infinite corridors by Vincent H. '23

in the (almost) two years since leaving school, the term “infinite corridor” has taken on new meanings for me. at mit it refers to a long hallway on campus:

but lately when i think about infinite corridors this is the picture i have in mind:

i was so preoccupied during undergrad with picking the best possible version of myself to become – deciding on where to live and who to spend time with and career choices and so on. i thought the world became less malleable the moment you left school, and you can see the anxiety running strong through all my old blogs. these days i’m still a little anxious, but i’ve also realized things are not as set in stone as i imagined: i’ve already switched jobs and roles, signed a new lease, changed my hair and speaking style and health routines and a million other things. the stakes still feel high, but it’s also true that most actions are reversible and sometimes you just need to live longer and collect more experiences before you can really understand your own preferences

from my spiritual awakening:

i’m not saying your seeking is useless. what i mean is that you’re an unfolding process. your seeking is one beautiful, important part. every day changes us. the things we do, the things we see, the people we meet – these all move our process forward. keep seeking. living bundles the kindling. lightning does strike

at a high level my life is not so different from what it was like during school, though of course all the details have changed

• i still live with a large number of friends, though instead of a dorm with 18-to-22-year-olds in cambridge it’s a house in sf with people moderately older than me
• i still spend most of my time thinking about math and computers – though these days, instead of reading all the papers and writing all the code myself, most of the heavy lifting is done by tools like perplexity and cursor. i used to be quite insecure about this, but nowadays i’m grateful that work is easier than ever
• i still spend a lot of time writing, except on substack instead of the mit admissions blog. i think when i was in school a lot of my blogs could be considered rationality-adjacent (cringe), whereas now i spend less time trying to be rational and more time trying to understand people and feelings. on the whole i prefer the changes; obviously i no longer reach as broad of an audience as before, but more of my friends read my writing now and i get clearer engagement (eg. recently hit 100 likes on a post!). i still avoid capitalization when possible and punctuation at the ends of paragraphs

the second half of 2023 was absolutely brutal. i was reeling from moving to a new city and living in a house with forty old white men (don’t ask how) and a breakup and feeling incompetent at work and missing my friends and feeling unsafe at night. i felt like i’d been caught completely off-guard by life after school and often wondered if i’d squandered all my time in college, if i was being punished now for spending four years having fun instead of preparing for my future problems. by contrast 2024 was the best year of my life so far – i saw lots of friends and an eclipse and ten new states, my boss helped me figure out how to think about feelings and communication more clearly, i learned more about the kinds of work i enjoy, i finally started taking better care of my physical health, and so on

it’s obviously not true that the new year suddenly made me way better at life. i think what is true is that progress often appears to be either nonexistent or explosive because we don’t have precise ways of measuring anything in between, so the little things accumulate undetected over time and then one day you suddenly feel like a different person. not to be a nerd but in my research there’s a notion that as language models get larger they appear to suddenly acquire new skills, but only because we evaluate skills via discontinuous metrics

even when everything sucked in late 2023 there would be glimmers of progress if i paid close attention – little things, like, i would plan an event or navigate a tricky conversation or write a particularly complex piece of code, and then i would look back and think huh, there’s no way i could’ve done that a few years ago. i’m not good at paying attention to small wins yet, but i think it becomes more important once you leave school and aren’t constantly getting feedback (eg. via grades), and i’d like to get there eventually

from the answer is not a hut in the woods:

when i really look back on it the real adventures were someone you know doing something you don’t expect or trying to remember how you fixed yourself after a blue patch and realizing it was largely thanks to someone standing benevolently in the background of your life and doing it quietly from afar without you even realizing it… perhaps the strangest adventure, perhaps the most humbling one, happens on the inside – discovering those parts of yourself you’ve never acknowledged, jettisoning those parts you’ve never liked and constantly, constantly being aware that you will soon turn into someone else and whoever that is is decided at every moment by you now and in two minutes and two minutes after that until 10 years later, after one very long succession of two minutes you find a new you sitting there and you’re not even sure where they began nor where they’ll end